Why I Founded Free Speech Press

Online censorship has become increasingly sophisticated and surveillance technology is developing at extraordinary speed. Many people now instinctively calculate the possible consequences before publicly expressing an opinion. The chilling effect of this is enormous. A country can retain the outward appearance of free expression while the people who live within it gradually self-censor out of fear of reprisals.

That is why I founded Free Speech Press, a new publishing house that champions free speech, challenges orthodoxies and provides a home for some of the most courageous voices of our time.

Free Speech Press is an imprint of Fisher King Publishing, an independent British publisher established in 1991. Along with Fisher King’s Managing Director, Rick Armstrong, my ambition is to build a prestigious publishing house that represents some of the best and most influential free speech advocates in the UK and across the globe.

There are things that desperately need to be said now. Climate alarmism, gender ideology, pharmaceutical products, censorship, illegal immigration, wokeism and the growing reach of the state are shaping our society, yet many people have become reluctant to speak openly about them. They have seen what can happen to those who question prevailing orthodoxies and have learned to keep their thoughts to themselves. Books can help break that silence. They can give people permission to explore ideas they may have been afraid to question, introduce them to arguments they rarely encounter elsewhere and, perhaps most importantly, inspire them to find the courage to openly express their opinions.

George Orwell’s novels are the perfect example of this, which is why our first publication is a new edition of 1984, with an original prologue written especially for us by Neil Oliver. Orwell wrote 1984 more than 75 years ago and died the following year, yet we still use the language he gave us to describe the world around us: Big Brother, Thought Police, doublethink, Newspeak and the memory hole.

Neil’s prologue begins on the remote Scottish island of Jura, where a grieving and increasingly sick Orwell retreated to Barnhill in 1946 and wrote the book that would become his final novel. Neil describes the future Orwell saw as one populated by citizens “denied hope, made hopeless”. He then brings Orwell firmly into our own time, writing that 1984 increasingly appears to be regarded “less as dire warning of totalitarianism and more a must have How To handbook for would-be dictators everywhere”.

Neil writes of Big Brother becoming real through “the apparatus of panopticon surveillance” and observes that technology may now “see and hear all anyway”.

Alongside Orwell’s 1984, I have approached a small number of influential authors, journalists and thinkers and asked them to write something slightly unusual for us: a short book of around 20,000 words that can be read in a few hours. These books are provocations, thought pieces and arguments on controversial and off-limits subjects, designed to spark debate.

There is an enormous amount of intellectual territory between a newspaper column and an 80,000-word conventional book, and some of the most interesting people in public life have ideas and experiences that belong precisely in that space. These are also the kinds of books that traditional publishers rarely seem willing to publish, constrained by political sensitivities, DEI orthodoxies and fears of cancel culture. Free Speech Press gives writers the freedom to challenge this oppressive and increasingly uncreative intellectual landscape, to put urgent arguments into print while they still matter and to allow readers to decide for themselves.

One of the founding authors at Free Speech Press, Mike Graham, has already shown what is possible. Mike has spent four decades at the front line of mainstream media, working in newspapers and broadcasting and seeing the relationship between politics and the media from the inside. I asked him to write a book and within a few weeks we had one.

FAKE NEWS: The Secret Deal Between Government and the Media takes the reader behind the public face of Fleet Street and broadcasting and into a world of newspaper propaganda, political double-dealing and the relationships between the people running the country and the people reporting on them. Mike draws upon a career that has taken him from war zones to the corridors of power and through the extraordinary media landscape of the Covid years. There are private dinners, encounters with powerful political and media figures and even an extraordinary occasion when he was approached about spying by the Foreign Office.

Within hours of publication, FAKE NEWS reached number one in three Amazon categories, it climbed to the top one hundred books across Amazon UK, and also hit the number one spot in paperbacks.

Britain needs places where difficult ideas can be explored properly and writers can put their names to what they believe. Books give those ideas permanence and allow arguments that might otherwise disappear into the digital ether to remain available for others to discover, question and build upon. Orwell has been dead for more than three-quarters of a century and we are still discussing what he wrote. As Neil Oliver writes in the closing line of his prologue, “the words committed to the pages of 1984 grow louder day by day”.

I cannot think of a better reason to start a publishing house.

Mike Fairclough, a former head teacher, is the founder of Free Speech Press.